One of Britain’s most historic cities is being threatened by a circle of 40 wind farms under plans drawn-up by its Labour-led authority. Joe Watt, a Conservative city councillor, said: “The fear is that if it is on the plans and is accepted by the government inspector, then that is seen as a green light for a developer to come and put a wind turbine up."

Aptronym! Wonder if Joe's wife is named Meg? Or Terry? Nah, that would be too perfect.

NSR has a feature on illegal immigrants working in the dairy industry. As usual NSR defends the interests of the super-rich, claiming that dairy farmers haven't been able to hire natives.
One of the immigrants said that he was happy with the money he earned, because he was able to support his family back home and buy land in his village.
Hmm. Maybe if you paid natives enough that they could live on the farm, support their family, and buy land, they might be willing to take the job.
It's similar in other industries. Software companies pay Hindoos about half of what they pay natives, and the Hindoos are happy with the money because they can support a large family back home and hire cooks and nannies for their family.
Hmm again. Maybe if you paid native programmers enough to support a large family and hire domestic servants, you'd have less trouble finding natives to work.
The problem is obvious. Currency conversion is fraudulent. Currency values are based on arbitrary government decisions and the greed of speculators. If currencies were based strictly on labor value, these imbalances would disappear.
Since that isn't going to happen, the best cure is to simply eliminate all cross-boundary dealing in labor. No importation of human laborers, no importation of labor hours. If you want to sell anything in America, 100% of the labor must be done by Americans. The only exception is raw materials that can't be grown or mined here, such as bananas or lanthanum. Growing and mining involve labor in the countries where the materials are grown; since there's no substitute for the material, an exception is needed for those labor hours.
Another argument for economics as a verb.

Less than 24 hours after California started issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples, lawyers for the sponsors of the state's gay marriage ban filed an emergency motion Saturday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the weddings being performed in San Francisco.

Too late, folks. You're operating within the quaint old-fashioned definition of "law", which no longer holds. You're trying to gain votes, trying to get judges to follow the law.
Won't work. Since 1968 in culture and academia, and since 1989 in the DC "government", law is gone. Kaput. Expired. Deceased. Ex. Voting is irrelevant, petitions are irrelevant.
Why? Because the people who could assist civilization, the people who could respond rationally to your votes and petitions, the candidates who could offer a serious non-Satan alternative, are no longer there.
And why are they absent?
Because SatanGoldman's forces have not been using cute little non-functional symbols like votes and petitions. SatanGoldman's minions have been using blackmail and extortion, which actually work. At every level from city councils to state legislatures to Congress, every supporter of civilization has been under cultural pressure from the media, and under direct criminal pressure (death threats) from SatanGoldman's activists. Anyone who dares to speak truth on ANY issue is relentlessly slammed, oppo-researched, blackmailed, "exposed", and honeytrapped. When those subtle methods fail, SatanGoldman runs violent mobs to halt civilization in its tracks. See Turkey,Egypt, Texas for immediate examples.
Net result: The most effective speakers for life and sanity are permanently removed from all power and credibility. Lower-level workers see what happens to the big folks, and either leave or shut the fuck up.
Face it. The conversation has been transformed a long time ago.
I remember one of my OSR neighbors in 1969. Shotgun Washington was a jive-ass spade, armed robber by profession. Shotgun liked to say true things, a rare quality among both criminal and non-criminal types. After pointing out a plain and simple truth, Shotgun would say "Conversation Closed, mofo. Conversation Closed."
And that's the plain-truth meaning of Conversation Transformed.

(1) Edward Snowden's father has been appearing in the news. For some stupid reason he looks highly familiar to me, but I can't spot the connection. Reminds me of people I knew in Manhattan. Maybe the father of one of my old buddies, or maybe one of my old friends in adult form. This doesn't make sense; far as I can tell, Snowden has never lived in Kansas, and I've never known anyone named Snowden.
Later: Think I've pinned it down. (Writing these things always helps to organize them.) Snowden reminds me of a guy named Danskin who lived down the street from us in the late '50s. Most of the K-State profs were vaguely liberalish, but the Danskin family was seriously political. The kids called the parents by first name instead of Mom and Dad, and the kids never played with the rest of us. Seemed like the Danskins didn't want their kids to pick up Midwestern cooties from us.
(2) As a pure introvert, I rarely use the telephone. It's no fun. Might pick it up 5 times a year to reach bureaucrats or plumbers or doctors who can't be contacted by email. I turn on the bell even more rarely, maybe 3 times a year, when a contact involves waiting for someone to return a message. (I started putting a bell switch on my phone in the '70s, before you could legally buy phones with bell switches.)
Yet every single time I turn on the bell, a telemarketer or robocall comes in almost immediately. Think about that.... Sampling a stream for just three hours per year, with no pattern to the samples. At each sample, a telemarketer is there. This means that shit calls must be coming into my (unlisted) number CONSTANTLY. That's an impressive amount of wasted labor! If nothing else, it verifies my decision to keep the bell off.
(3) The telemarketer thing happened again yesterday while I was playing phone tag with my courseware publisher. They are "phone-centered" people who have to do everything via conference calls, even when it involves technical data that would be better sent by email. We've been having this particular conference call at intervals for two years now. Each time it's the same: several new people have been hired, and most of the hour is spent bringing the new hires up to speed on the project. Each time I try to get clear instructions so I can start work, and each time the call ends with a wide-ranging discussion of basic questions and an indication that instructions will be coming. Yesterday's call may finally be different, since they seem to have settled on a specific system and format. Remains to be seen.
[Update 7/25: Today they actually sent me the actual link and actual password to actually get started learning the actual system! Only a month after the promise! Oh well. Now I know they've been distracted by their bankruptcy and reorganization, which makes these delays more understandable.]
Needless to say, Parkinson understood these people. It's sort of amusing to observe these predictable patterns at a distance. If nothing else, it verifies my decision to stop working in offices 10 years ago. When you're stuck in the middle of the patterns, they're more annoying than amusing.
(4) I typically hit the grocery store between 7 and 8 AM. Most customers at that hour are getting ready for work: some are picking up sandwiches and bottled drinks for lunch, some are clearly the Daily Designated Dozen Donut Donor for their office. The donut gatherers exhibit a couple of consistent patterns. First, though the donut case contains more round items than rectangular items, the gatherers choose only rectangular items. This would make sense if the deal was "all you can fit in the box", but the price is for a dozen items. Do they intuitively feel that they're getting more because the rectangular items fit more easily? Or is it just less trouble?
Second consistency: The type of item depends strictly on the weight of the gatherer. Donut donors of normal weight pick up a variety of rectangular items, with and without frosting of various colors. Hefty gatherers always pick the maximum amount of chocolate frosting.
(5) We had a thunder this morning. No storm, just a whole lot of lightning and thunder. Sorta backwards... normally when the radar shows red, we get the storm (heavy downpours, graupel and wind) but not the thunder.
Before the storm, the sky showed all sorts of strange colors and backlighting effects:
Later: Bleah. The morning thunder presaged an all-day rain. Twelve hours so far, and still going. Not a whole lot of rain, but constant. Thunder in the distance, thunder up close, some rain. Thunder in the distance, thunder up close, some rain. Rinse and rinse and rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat. Power has been blinking and surging, transformers popping, computer rebooting. The only good part is that the rain might postpone the urban heat accumulation, cutting a few degrees from the 104 predicted for Tuesday. Today was supposed to hit 90, and it's stuck at 70.

As a somewhat unusual heat wave hits the Western states, "Border patrols are increasing their rescue activities because illegal border crossers might be suffering from dehydration."
Let's try that again.
"Border patrols are increasing their rescue activities because illegal border crossers might be suffering from dehydration."
Again.
"Border patrols are increasing their rescue activities because illegal border crossers might be suffering from dehydration."
Just one more time.
"Border patrols are increasing their rescue activities because illegal border crossers might be suffering from dehydration."
No, it still doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how I try to think about it.
Die-Versity wins. Satan wins.

Couple years ago I noted some possible signs of progress in the Anglican Bathhouse...

There's no doubt which side old JC himself would have taken. Old JC's purpose as a reformer was simple. He saw that Jews had become totally corrupted by money and by association with Roman power, and he wanted to create a religious system that would accommodate the needs of normal people. He wanted a religion that would reject money and power.
In the modern world, things haven't changed. The Jews are still the money-changers, still the vectors of infinite greed, still associating with Roman (now called EU) imperial force.
Over the centuries, the successors of JC have generally followed the Jews into corruption and greed, and the Anglicans are an especially atrocious example. St Paul's intimate association with power goes back 500 years: check out the origin of the phrase robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Every now and then a reform movement arises, trying to take the church back to JC's purpose, but most of the reform movements fall back into Jewish behavior after a generation or so. For example, the Pentecostal movement started as a highly emotional direct God-contact for poor oppressed people, and quickly evolved into the Prosperity Doctrine and Tammy Faye.
These resignations of St Paul officials are important and unusual, because they show a desire for reform inside a Jewish-style temple of greed.

The [Bathhouse] of England has joined a consortium of financiers who are battling to win a bid for 315 Royal Bank of Scotland branches. RBS was ordered to sell the portfolio of branches in 2009 by European competition authorities... Lord Davies, who is a partner of Corsair Capital, is part of a consortium whose other investors include Lord Rothschild’s RIT capital; Centrebridge, an American investor, and Standard Life. It is thought to be the first time the Church Commissioners have invested directly in a bank deal.

Bloomberg reports the latest Cool Thing among New Yorkers: A chain of upscale fruit juice stores has developed a brand new fruit drink, super-rare and super-cool and not available anywhere else! The company has bought the entire crop of fruit from a unique cactus that grows only on one side of one volcano in Nicaragua.
Oooh! Unique! Cool! Only grows in one small place! Supercool! And the one small place is in Holy Saintly Progressive Nee-Kah-Dah-Wah, home of LIVING SAINT Comrade Daniel Ortega[pbuh]! Ooooh! Supersupercool! Oh! I can't take it... I can't ... I can't... Ah Ah Ah Ahhh. Yesssssssss. Yesssssssss. Oooooh Golllllllldmannnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.
But wait! Unique cactus. One small place. The entire crop of fruit from this unique plant that only grows in one place. Doesn't that sound like....? Yup, it's a Holy Saintly Angelic ENDANGERED SPECIES, and you've just consumed all of its seeds.
Oh well. Doesn't matter. We're rich. We're cool. We're New Yorkers. We're Progressive. We're Enlightened. We're Gay. Everything we do is perfect by definition, because we write the dictionaries.

While Satan uses mob rule and chaos to kill Texas, a parliamentary system leads to a wonderful and sudden DEFEAT OF SATAN in Australia. The Prime Minister can be removed by an internal vote of his own party, and a vote within the Labor Party has just now removed PM Satan! Kevin Rudd will become PM almost immediately, after a very short transition.
This is a FUNCTIONAL system with FUNCTIONAL feedback loops, capable of responding to urgent national needs, capable of removing evil or incompetent leaders quickly. It's even capable of removing Satan herself!
Can't happen here. We're stuck on stupid, 100% paralyzed.
We need to rewind 1776 and return to the British system. Parliament still works sometimes. Our system is national suicide all the time.

Lawmakers had to vote on Senate Bill 5 before the special session's end at 12 a.m. local time. However, more than 400 protesters halted the proceedings 15 minutes before the roll call could be completed with what they called "a people's filibuster,"

I had been wondering about this new GoldmanOccupy phrase, thinking that it sounded something like old-fashioned Alinskyan mob rule but not quite the same. Now I know that it's the same.
"Transforming The Conversation" is just plain old mob rule. Violent murderous Satanthugs are able to control everything by using raw violence, reinforced by the universal support of Satan's media.
Satan wins. Abortion wins. Murdering children is still required by the law of Satan, which is the "law" of this miserable fucked dead country.

Felt like a storm was approaching, so I checked Weather.com's excellent radar.
What the hell? Would you call that an eye or a wreath or a lagoon? In either case it's among the weirdest radar patterns I've ever seen.
Later: The eye pattern disappeared, but it was still a fierce little storm when it arrived.

In 1861, Satan dba "Madman Lincoln" decided it would be fun to burn down half of America and kill nearly a million people. Since then, Satanic leaders of the illegitimate "government" in DC have continued Madman Lincoln's war. DC troops occupied parts of the South until around 1900. There was a sort of partial ceasefire for a few decades, then in 1965 Satan dba "LBJ" re-started the war.
Now, as of today, Madman Johnson's re-start is finally over.
Armistice Day for a 150-year war that was completely unnecessary in the first place. If Madman Lincoln had wanted an America where only the Northern industrial form of slavery was legal, he could have simply allowed the South to separate, freeing the North from competition by the Southern agrarian form of slavery. He didn't allow secession, which tells us he needed to see lots of blood, guts and fire.

During the night, mechanisms inside the leaf measure the size of the starch store. Information about time comes from an internal clock, similar to the human body clock.
The researchers proposed that the process is mediated by the concentrations of two kinds of molecules called "S" for starch and "T" for time.
If the S molecules stimulate starch breakdown, while the T molecules prevent this from happening, then the rate of starch consumption is set by the ratio of S molecules to T molecules. In other words, S divided by T.
Commenting on the research, Dr Richard Buggs of Queen Mary, University of London, said: "This is not evidence for plant intelligence. It simply suggests that plants have a mechanism designed to automatically regulate how fast they burn carbohydrates at night. Plants don't do maths voluntarily and with a purpose in mind like we do."

Garbanzo is demonstrating his talents.
Actually this shouldn't be remotely surprising. In animal nervous systems, EVERYTHING is done by ratios. NOTHING is simply linear. All sensory inputs go through a ratio comparison process at some stage.
Plant senses work differently at the chemical level, but Nature doesn't really care much about details. Design is based on purpose, and the purpose of senses is always defined by logarithms and ratios.
The last sentence is especially amusing:
"Plants don't do maths voluntarily and with a purpose in mind like we do."
What you mean WE, academic man? You're talking about symbolic math, which is not a basic feature of humans. A very small number of humans have been doing symbolic math for a very short period of time. Also, you don't know what's in the plant's mind. You simply assume that the plant has less awareness than you do, which is totally unfounded and insulting.
Here's the timeline of good old H. Sapiens in bar chart form, showing the number of humans engaging in symbolic math. 400,000 years of humans as a species, and roughly 4000 years since Babylonians invented written math ops. Long before math, humans were estimating ratios both consciously and internally.
You didn't need symbolic math to understand the chart, did you? You picked up the ratio visually.
QED.

Wildly unsurprising: Savile Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) has taken up the GoldmanOccupy definition of democracy. An SBC satan is interviewing the Turkish finance minister, relentlessly hammering him with the same questions after he has answered them fully several times, never allowing him to finish a sentence, totally ignoring every point he tries to make.
The finance minister finally broke out of the usual bureaucratic calm and said "Why can't you hear me?"
Satan can't hear you because Satan is Satan, that's why.
Satan's constant theme, repeated 100 times, is "You won the election. This means the people who lost the election should rule."
At Savile, the Conversation has been fully Transformed.
Wildly unsurprising.
Toward the end, Satan actually reveals her true boss: "Investors are a fragile bunch."
Got it. The Goldman Rule: Goldman rules.

Listening to EWTN (the Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary Hail Mary network) discussing persnickety details of required mass attendance. It took 15 minutes for them to cover all the epicycles of prohibitions and multi-layered exceptions for just one particular holy day.
Got me to thinking: Islam doesn't build such baroquely detailed castles of epicycles, but it's equally strict about praying five times a day and observing holy days.
Protestants aren't strict about observances. No firm requirements. Sing Jingle Bells at Xmas and you're saved.
Where did the first industrial sweatshop era happen? In Protestant countries where nothing interfered with 18 hours of hard uninterrupted labor for the capitalist boss. And where is the second sweatshop era happening right now? In Confucian countries, ditto.
Catholic and Muslim countries have stayed closer to the pre-1800 system of individual farmers, craftsmen, and traders. When they do participate in the industrial system, they go more for home-based piecework, which leaves more room for both religious life and private dignity.
I'd say they got the better end of the deal.

Sudden news today: Ed Snowden has left Hong Kong on a Russian flight, perhaps headed ultimately for some other country. Maybe Iceland, maybe Cuba, maybe staying in Russia. Not clear where he is or where he will go.
Ever since this started, I've been itching to use the immortal line from Catch-22. Finally got the chance!
Ou sont les Neigedens d'antan?
Paranoid sidenote: Thinking in proper 'Hall of Mirrors' form, we have to ask why Snowden is still alive. If NSA truly didn't want his revelations to get out, he would have been suicided before he had a chance to say anything. Just some young dude killed in a car crash. Young dudes always drive recklessly. No story here.
Since he wasn't suicided yet, perhaps his 100% unrevealing "revelations" about programs that have been widely known and understood for 30 years serve as a useful distraction from something really new and outrageous in NSA's toolbox.

Basic rule: Dry air carries bad smells, wet air carries good smells. This morning's air is still wet from Thursday's allday rain, and it's carrying the best smell I've ever encountered.
I'd heard chainsaws on Thursday, so I directed this morning's walk toward the area where they seemed to be running. Along the way, an east wind brought an aroma that factored neatly into 3 parts mesquite and 1 part mustard. Best smell ever. I suspect it's coming from the Colorado forest fires, filtered by distance.
Found where the chainsaws had been running, and it made me unhappy despite the perfect smell. They cut down the Hypotenuse Tree that I had saluted just a couple weeks ago!
Understandable move, I suppose. The house behind Hypotenuse was for sale for a long time, and now it's been sold. Presumably the buyer wanted the 'ugly' tree to be removed as a condition of purchase.
So my little tribute has turned into an obit.
Sidenote for clarity: I'm emphatically not a tree-hugger, and I would have cut the tree down if I had owned the property. In fact I would have cut down all the trees, not just the Hypotenuse. Which is exactly what I did on my own property as soon as I could afford it! But since Hypotenuse was someone else's hazard, I could think about it sentimentally.

Hmm. Not sure if I'm still asleep in a bad dream, or a flashback from my hippieshit years, or what........
This is Taiwan's "Sweet Museum", apparently consisting of animatronic candy.
Google Translate helpfully explains:
"Power Wheels - rotate the Arts would like to see the world candy days"
Ah. Now I understand.

I've been wondering if anyone tried to use the 'Shepardson effect' for practical purposes. Probably shouldn't credit Shepardson for the idea ... he was just writing about it ... but it doesn't seem to have a proper name, so this will do. Name aside, the theory is simple: plants use ionized air for energy. Seems most plausible with conifers, since their needles are obviously built as charge catchers, not sunlight catchers.
Here's a 1909 article about an experiment with cabbage and other crops on farms near Dayton. One of the farms belonged to Ohio Gov James Cox, who later ran for president in 1920. The experiment was apparently succeeding, but we don't know what happened afterward. Not enough success? Too expensive? Suppressed by more 'conventional' ag interests?
Must admit the picture caught my eye before I noticed the Shepardson connection! The pipe-smoking colored gentleman with sleeve garters illustrates a fact that modern idiots like to ignore: there has always been a distinguished black middle class. Was he Mr E.A. Deeds, mentioned in the text? The caption doesn't specify.
= = = = =
Static fields also showed benefit when applied to humans. This was one form of Electrotherapy, a solidly experimental branch of medicine that was discredited by the pill-pushers in the 20th century and now returns under different names. Turns out the electrotherapists were mainly correct.
Polistra and Happystar have already demonstrated the power of point-to-point current, which the electrotherapists called 'Faradic therapy'. The newer Faradic devices use names like TCDS and TENS to maintain the pretense of new discovery.
Now we'll show the 'Franklinic' or static field. Polistra is suffering from vapors and miasmas, and she happens to find an Electrotherapy clinic.......
Mr Star describes the difference between the Faradic and Franklinic machines.
He recommends the Franklinic, and Polistra gets hooked up. The high-voltage field is applied without direct contact, between the 'crown' headpiece and the ground platform:
= = = = =
Artistic note for Poser types: I've released these machines on ShareCG.

In my pointless comments on the NSA/GCHQ mess, I've been focusing on Parkinson's Laws. You can't expect to rein in these bureaucracies by mere laws and regulations. Their only law is INFINITE EXPANSION, and any new technology that requires BIG MONEY will be adopted and used to the max to justify the "need" for BIG MONEY.
Today's UK Telegraph article on GCHQ features an aerial photo that keys into another Parkinson law. Old Parky observed that organizations housed in a dingy basement, or a jumble of ill-fitted buildings, were lively and devoted to a real purpose. When an organization finally gets its superfancy highly architected highly specialized flashy new building, you know it's effectively dead. It has outrun its original purpose, and it will continue spinning faster and faster with no proper goals or directions.
Sure enough, you can see the original WW2 barracks where serious and ingenious decoding of Kraut messages played a major part in ending a horrible war. And in the foreground you see the highly architected supermodern building, resembling a 1970's removable disk pack, spinning faster and faster.
All you need is Parkinson.
= = = = =
And a few days later, headline in UK Telegraph:Spy agencies win millions more to fight terror threat
All you need is Parkinson.

Normally after a heavy rain the sidewalks and streets are full of slugs and earthworms.
LAST YEAR:
Not today. This morning should have been Slug Central. Nothing. No annelids, no molluscs.
THIS YEAR:
I'd always assumed the slimies were forced out of saturated soil by the need for breathable air. Maybe that theory is wrong? This morning was cold and foggy and sunless. Same weather as during the rain, except no drops hitting the soil. Maybe the critters are just seeking warmth....?
(Incidentally, the BEFORE picture was made exactly one year ago, 6/20/12, just after a similar heavy rain. Natural cycles, anyone?)

Spokane is getting 36 hours of rain. Probably will amount to 1.5 inches when it finally tapers off. Not impressive by Midwest standards, but impressive enough here.
The radar shows the typical brace-n-bit storm. A low reaches Spokane, likes it here, and sticks around until it drills all the way down to basalt. Round and round and round and round and round and round. When this pattern happens in winter, we get 15 inches of snow instead of 1.5 inches of rain.
Hmm. Wonder where the moisture is coming from? Ah yes, the jet stream. You rarely see it so sharply on radar. It comes roaring off the top of the Cascades, spraying across the valley until it hits the brace-n-bit, which smears it around until it all drops to the ground.
Friday morning: Seems to be mostly finished. Here's a crammed-together picture of the NWS rain record.

"Obama says at least 50 threats have been averted because of phone records and Internet information the agency was able to access."
Same line comes from other officials.
Okay, fine. Tell us ALL THE DETAILS, in a form that can be checked against existing publicly available information, and we might start to believe.
Until then, STOP INSULTING OUR INTELLIGENCE with the ratshit about "giving away methods and sources to the enemy." Soviet Agent Bush the Son handed us this crap all the time. We're tired of it.
THINK. THINK. THINK. IF THE ENEMY'S PLOT WAS FOILED BY OUR METHODS AND SOURCES, THE ENEMY KNOWS THAT HIS PLOT WAS FOILED, AND HE KNOWS EXACTLY HOW IT WAS FOILED.
Only the American people are uninformed. Again, this tells us instantly that the real enemy of the DC "government" is the American people.

As the Carbon Crime starts to fall apart (thanks be to God!) the mass-murdering genocidists are making a pitiful little attempt to hold onto the last scrap of their lost credibility.
Just a year ago, the criminals felt confident enough to directly and solely blame Evilllll KKKarbonnnnnn for absolutely everything that seemed bad or inconvenient. Now they feel the need to include some actual causes, but always tack on 'climate change' to keep the scam running.
Corals are declining? Caused by pollution, overfishing, and climate change.
Drought? Caused by El Nino cycles, AMO cycles, and climate change.
Floods? Caused by building houses in floodplains, stuck jet streams, and climate change.
Honeybees dying? Caused by mites, colony transport, pesticides, and climate change.
Forest fires? Caused by bad forest management, urban sprawl, and climate change.
Endangered wolves? Caused by overhunting, urban sprawl, and climate change.
= = = = =
Polistra remembers a joke product sold in souvenir stores along with Fake Vomit Fool Your Friends! and Fake Dead Rat Fool Your Friends!
This one was called INSTANT WATER. It was an obviously empty tin can with a label that said "INSTANT WATER. Miraculous new preparation! Take along on trips! To reconstitute as water, JUST ADD WATER!"
The new climate trick is the same.
INSTANT WEATHER! Consists of highly concentrated Evillll KKKarbon and Iniquitous Human Sins Against Gaia! To reconstitute as Weather, JUST ADD WEATHER!

Last night CBS asked the only meaningful question about the latest Colo wildfire: Should we be building so many houses in the middle of forests? The answer is absolutely NO.
The video from that fire certainly illustrated the problem. HUGE houses with lots of forest between them. Just begging to be smashed by wind or crisped by fire.
In the same report CBS said that "One-third of all Americans now live in exurban forest land." I've heard similar figures before, sometimes given as a hundred million people instead of 1/3.
Really? This seems highly unlikely. Half of Americans live in suburban/exurban areas overall, but the vast majority of those exurban areas are former farmland or river bottom, not forests. I could go along with 1/10 of the population in former forests, but not 1/3.

I'm a fan of 'urban decay porn'. I was searching Google Images for Robinwood Street Detroit, and happened on this accidental conglomeration.
PLEASE NOTE: IMAGE DOES NOT DEPICT ACTUAL ASSET.
Right. Nuff said.
= = = = =
I shouldn't be laughing. I should be weeping. Before the Jew Mafia moved all jobs to China, that image DID depict most of Detroit's assets. Black auto workers and white auto workers lived in houses like that.

(1) Strikes me as interesting that the Kurdish revolt in Turkey ended a few months ago, and soon thereafter the Goldman-driven hippieshit revolt in Turkey started. Were the Kurds being run by Goldman as well? Or were they just serving Goldman's purpose of destabilizing the world's only sane government? More likely the latter. When the Kurdish destabilizing stopped, Goldman had to start a new low-level revolt.
(2) Thinking about the old trite cartoon of fish evolving to humans. Of course it's clear by now that those 'stages' weren't stages at all; it's clear that all major types of critter were present in the original genome, if not necessarily instantiated at the start. But even if you accept the sequence idea, there's something deeply wrong with the last two stages.
The cartoon typically goes: fish, salamander, bear, ape, human. Okay, swimming makes sense. Four-footed walking makes sense. But the half-upright gait of apes DOESN'T make sense. The conventional Darwinian story assumes that the human two-footed gait is a sort of accidental and precarious outgrowth of the supposedly more normal ape gait. Nonsense. Two-footed walking is demonstrably one of the 'resonant modes' of animal form, because all birds do it. Broadening our view to all living things, standing upright on a narrow base is an even stronger 'phase-lock point'. Most plants and trees do it. So it seems more likely that the half-upright ape stance is the secondary and precarious outgrowth. (And apes aren't doing very well, are they?)
(3) News from one of the totally wacked (i.e. non-Turkey) governments:
Ian Brady, the "Moors murderer", is due to begin a legal hearing today in which he will effectively ask for the right to end his life, a move that other victims’ relatives are opposing.
Satan at work. Satan refuses to punish crime in any way that helps to reduce crime; and when a criminal offers to create his own punishment, Satan must refuse that as well. Confusion, contradiction and criminality must reign supreme.
(4) Polistra is bemused by the idiot Futurist who assumes that humans will evolve to look like Polistra.
Why are Futurists so uniformly incurably stupid? Those bug-eyed people are Western elite types, Hollywood types. They look like Ed Snowden and his pole-dancing girlfriend. Those types won't be around 100,000 years from now, because Western elite types ARE NOT REPRODUCING. They have already "evolved" into fags and dykes. Overall, the elite countries are way below replacement rates.
The people who are reproducing are darker and larger, and their bodies are growing much faster than their eyes.
Let's focus on the idiot futurist notion that big eyes mean better survival. What is the function of any sense? To give you an accurate picture of your surroundings. Which sense is easiest to deceive? The eyes, followed closely by the ears. Which sense is hardest to deceive? Tactile, followed closely by olfactory. If you've got your hands on something, you know what it is.
The elites understand this point thoroughly. They have taken full control of our eyes, SLAMMING SLAMMING SLAMMING SLAMMING an unending tachistoscopic stream of evil deception into our eyes day and night. And they are trying to obliterate all smells, in the name of Die-Versity for people who are supposedly Distinctly Enabled By Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.
So. If we assume (badly) that size of organ implies strength of sense, and if we assume (correctly) that people with superior tactile and olfactory senses acquire the most accurate and least fool-able picture of their surroundings, then we come right back to Africans, don't we? Wide nostrils, long fingers, hard to fool, reproducing fast. Maybe, just maybe, old Ma Nature knows exactly what she's doing.
Like it says up there in the icon. "Look about you. Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you." ... GW Carver.

While all English-speaking countries have meaningless elections with zero consequence, Persia elects a new President with a DIFFERENT agenda from the previous one.
Since we know as a basic axiom of Nature that Persia is "primitive and tyrannical and fascist", I guess this strange mysterious election between DIFFERENT candidates must be yet another symptom of its "primitive and tyrannical and fascist" condition.
I'm glad we live in an enlightened progressive democratic country where we don't have the awful burden of CHOOSING a leader from DIFFERENT ALTERNATIVES. That would be just horrible. How can these Persians tolerate the atrocious primitive fascist responsibility?

One constant theme pops up among Occupy types in America, Germany and Turkey. The invariant slogan is Transforming the conversation. When expanded it often sounds like this:
"Democracy doesn't mean the winning side gets to impose their agenda. Democracy really means that the losing side should dominate the discussion."
I'm not sure of the underlying purpose. It resembles good old Alinskyan Dialectic, but I don't think it's quite the same. My rusty old Hippieshit Decoder Machine doesn't have a symbol for this concept.
Assuming the saying means just what it says, it's completely pointless for America. Already happened a long time ago. As my father used to say, "If you want Republican policies, vote Democrat. If you want Democrat policies, vote Republican."
More recently and specifically, those who voted for Bush The Son got pure Teddy Kennedy. Those who voted for Obama got pure McCain/Romney.
Maybe this crossover isn't obvious to the 70% of the population who are totally blinded by TV, but it's hardly a mystery.
Is this new slogan an attempt to discourage those delusional people who think voting makes a difference? If so, it's a welcome acceptance of reality. If not, I simply can't parse it.

NPR this morning:
"There was a time when America's enemies communicated face-to-face, or through couriers. Now they use email, Twitter, etc."
Actually America's real enemies, like Sheikh Osama, still communicate face-to-face or through couriers. We didn't catch Osama until we reverted to old-fashioned face-to-face spycraft.
What does this tell you about Idiot Clapper's claims that Snowden's revelations "tell our enemies what we're doing"?
It tells you who Clapper's enemies are, and they're not the same as "America's enemies."

Kodak announced that it's finally all out of the film business, all in with printers.
Hey dummies! Why don't you make a fucking printer that doesn't require cartridges? A printer that has built-in refill holes for ink, and a cleanable print head. Charge BIG BUCKS for the printer. A thousand bucks, two thousand. I'd snap it up in an instant. Anyone who does serious graphics work would grab it. One big expense MORE THAN COMPENSATES for the endless trouble, dirty hands, wasted material, inconsistent color, and delays when you forget to order cartridges.

So much for the slightly more cautious Obama. After 4 years of 10% comparative sanity on the foreign front, Obama finally becomes 100% Romney, 100% McCain and 100% Bush.
WMD! WMD! WMD! Invade! Invade! Invade! Robust! Robust! Robust! All Options On The Table! All Options On The Table! All Options On The Table! Occupy! Occupy! Occupy! A hundred years, a thousand years, a billion years, vigintillion years, whatever it takes to achieve TOTAL ... um, I dunno, something or other!!!!!!!! Onward to something or other! Irgendwas Heil! Irgendwas Heil! Irgendwas Heil!
I'm sure the partisans will handle this in the usual way.
D will say: Romney wanted to invade Syria but that was EVIL because it was Romney. Obama wants to invade Syria and that's ANGELIC because it's Obama.
R will say: Romney wanted to invade Syria but that was ANGELIC because it was Romney. Obama wants to invade Syria and that's EVIL because it's Obama.
Don't they ever get tired? Maybe they do. After all, I got tired of being an R partisan somewhere around 2006. I'm still ashamed of the 5 years I spent in the land of wack.

This neighborhood is mainly 40s and 50s houses, mainly painted in unobtrusive earth-tones. Grays, tans, creams.
I tried to capture the scheme in my digital salute to the default '50s house:
but didn't quite get there. The hip-roofed house on the right is appropriate, but the others are too bright.
This morning the sun was 'lensed and irised' through a partial hole in the clouds:
and those subtle earth-tones suddenly SHOUTED! Clamored for attention! BANG! WHAM! Each gray and cream revealed its component parts, showed a unique personality. I won't even try to capture the effect with my cheap camera and nonexistent camera skills. Bound to fail.
This must be what painters and filmers mean by the 'golden hour'. Or maybe not... I walk at roughly the same time every morning, and never caught this amazing effect before. In any case, lucky I was alert enough to enjoy it!

Last year a local investment fraudster named Hiatt was convicted. I found that I couldn't sympathize with the 'victims' in that case because they were all rich enough to check basic facts. The 'victims' were doctors and lawyers who felt free to toss around a half million. If you have the resources to gamble on that scale, you also have the resources to determine whether a patent exists or whether a corporation actually does any business. No sympathy.
And here we go again.

A former Spokane man persuaded 50 investors to pay about $1.5 million to build an ethanol plant on the West Plains that never materialized, according to an indictment unsealed in federal court Wednesday.
Robert J. Braun, 53, faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $5 million after he was indicted on 27 felony counts of wire and securities fraud.
Court records say that instead of building the ethanol plant, Braun used the money to pay mortgages on three homes, for department store and clothing purchases, for car loans and to subsidize a women’s shoe and accessory store that he owned in Spokane.

Dividing 1.5 million by 50 investors = 30K each. Not the same level as the previous fraud, but still a substantial amount of money to risk on one dubious scheme.
Of course any sane investor would turn away instantly when he saw the word ethanol, since the whole ethanol "industry" is a fraud from the start. It's solely designed to grab government subsidies.
It's parallel to the British banksters who are charged with manipulating the LIBOR. The LIBOR is not a natural part of banking or business; it was invented BY THE BANKSTERS in 1984, solely to make their criminal acts easier to organize. It's a single knob that controls the whole banking system. Since the knob itself is a criminal device, turning the knob "the wrong way" can't be called a crime as such. It's only an unfashionable style of committing the same crime that other banksters commit "the right way."

Three victories for civilization and defeats for Satan this week. Nice relief to see all of this after my stupid little bad day yesterday.
(1) Pope Francis recognizes the problem of the "Gay Lobby" (or in Spanish, "Gay Lobby") infesting the Vatican. He hasn't yet stated what he's going to do about it, but clear and open recognition is crucial. Benny didn't understand the problem, or more likely he was part of the problem.
(2) Erdogan has finally hosed out the spoiled-brat hippieshits who are working for Goldman. And he clearly recognizes their driving force:

Erdogan has increasingly accused foreign forces of trying to aggravate the troubles. ... He also rounded on speculators, foreign and domestic, in the country's capital markets, vowing to "choke" those who he said were growing rich off "the sweat of the people", and urging Turks to put their money in state not private banks.
"Those who attempt to sink the bourse, you will collapse ... If we catch your speculation, we will choke you. No matter who you are, we will choke you," he said.

The law bans the spreading of "propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations" to minors and sets heavy fines for violations. ... The Duma passed another law on Tuesday that made the insulting of religious feelings a crime punishable by up to three years in prison - a measure proposed after last year's Pussy Riot protest at a Moscow cathedral.

These measures haven't yet gone through the Upper House, but seem safe.

Having an all-around bad day. Sleep was cut short by a mysterious but meaningless noise. Couldn't get back to horizontal, so grimly started the day, knowing that a dentist appointment is coming in the afternoon. Managed a poor dump, which is unusual nowadays; since switching to home-cooked food with lots of fresh veg, I have excellent dumps most mornings.
Okay, that's three strikes so far. Short sleep, short dump, dentist ahead. With the day already spoiled, figured I might as well do some menial chores so they don't spoil a good day. Grabbed the brush and the Vanish, lifted the toilet seat....
Presto! A newly squashed spider on the rim. Not as big as the cartoonish one that Happystar is looking at, but big enough. Apparently got caught between the rim and the seat when I sat down. Imagine if the spider had been just a half inch further in ....... No, let's not imagine.
Later: Well, the dental appointment was the least bad part of this bad day. The hygienist had to do much less scraping than usual. Diet made the difference there as well. Crunchy carrots and tomatoes and chili powder keep the whole system tuned up.

The old "Franklin quote" about security vs freedom is popping up again amid the pointless noise around Snowden.
I've taken this apart before in a different context, but it deserves a new teardown. First, Franklin didn't say it. He only published a book by another writer containing it. Franklin did say something on the subject, but what he actually said was vastly more reasonable.
Leaving that aside, the advice or recommendation is that we ought to prefer freedom above security.
Why? I don't get it. Normal humans want a normal life. They want to work and socialize and raise a family, without having to worry about criminals of any sort. They want the government to protect them from murderers and fraudsters and thieves and enemy soldiers.
This divides into two expectations for governments. (1) Stay out of the way of normal life. (2) Protect normal people from evil people. (The two aren't strictly separate, because failing on the latter tends to ruin normal life indirectly.)
In today's world, only a few governments explicitly fail to allow normal life. North Korea for sure; possibly some of the post-Soviet messes like Belarus. At the moment, this form of failure is rare.
In today's world, many governments fail to protect their citizens from criminals. Most of the "advanced Western democracies" actually invite bankster-type crime, enthusiastically assisting the theft of trillions from poor people. And most of those same "democracies" also refuse to punish the more physical type of crime. Beaters and car thieves and terrorists may occasionally be arrested, but very rarely punished in a way that stops their crime.
= = = = =
If freedom means "I can do anything I want", who actually wants freedom? Psychopaths and criminals want freedom. And they already have it. The rich psychopaths who work for hedge funds or governments can take or kill or destroy at will. Nobody stops them. The lower-class psychopaths who beat people and steal stuff will sometimes end up in prison where they can beat people and steal stuff in a protected environment.
If freedom doesn't mean "I can do anything I want", then what does it mean? The people who advocate freedom generally don't know what the fuck they're talking about, but on the rare occasions when they offer specifics, they point to things like "due process" or "right to choose abortion" or "diversity", all of which are explicitly designed to protect criminals, not to protect normal people.
In short, freedom and security are not zero-sum complements. They are independent variables desired by mutually exclusive groups of people. The people who want security are NOT receiving it, and the people who want freedom ARE receiving it.
Finally, what does this have to do with NSA and Snowden? Precisely nothing. NSA has zero connection with "giving us security" or "protecting our freedoms". None of its spying has ever protected an American from anything. Nothing done by any part of the government since August 1945 has protected an American, or "protected our freedoms", whatever the fuck that means. It's likely that NSA's spying helps other gov't agencies to persecute Americans, but we'll never know.

In the last 4 years we've had 3 major leak cases.
(1) The still-unknown insider who dumped the emails of the Climate Criminals.
(2) Bradley Manning who dumped some communications by diplomat types.
(3) Edward Snowden who revealed how NSA works.
These three have ONE BIG THING in common: NO SURPRISES. Though the Satanic media and Satanic governments have been screeching and spinning their heads around and vomiting toxic glop in a vain attempt to get the public excited, sane people remain unexcited.
The leaks have provided huge masses of details to verify what sane people already knew. This makes them hugely valuable despite the lack of 'information' in the Shannon sense.
As it happens, I had some connection with the subjects of (1) and (3), so I was strongly and explicitly unsurprised by those two leaks.
On (1), I've been among the crowd of amateur science-lovers who have been easily disproving 100% of the criminally fraudulent claims of the mass-murdering Carbon Cult.
On (3), I worked in speech recognition research in the '80s and noticed that NSA was using academia to test and verify its own work, which was way ahead of anything we were doing in academia. So I've known for 30 years that NSA was in the mass-listening business. Earlier, in my hippieshit days, I learned from experience that CIA is not bothered by teensy-weensy picotrivialities like law or morality. CIA does whatever CIA wants.
I have no connection at all with (2), but every alert human being has always known that diplomats lie to the people they negotiate with. IT'S THEIR MOTHERFUCKING JOB, for fucking Christ's sake.
= = = = =
We still desperately NEED a substantive leak from the Wall Street Mafia. Though sane people can easily conclude that the Mafia has been stealing us blind, we still don't have a firm idea of how and why the 2008 Goldman Coup happened. We can dimly perceive the tentacles of the octopus by their shadows, but we don't have any records of its internal workings. How do they decide which country to collapse next? Which group of kulaks to starve into submission? Which entire industry to obliterate? Which part of civilized culture to smash?

BBC was reading some of their Facebook comments on the NSA rot. One of them ended with "...the battle for control of the Factors of Production never ends." The announcer appropriately and ever-so-Britishly noted: "Obviously went all Marxist on us there."
Hearing that old song in the midst of modern troubles shows how utterly obsolete Marx has become. The battle hasn't been over Factors Of Production for several decades now. Precisely the opposite. Each major country wants to eliminate the Factors Of Production from its own territory, and the Masters Of The Universe want to eliminate production entirely from The Planet.
That's why Goldman is running hippieshits against Turkey. Turkey still has a strong and growing Production sector, which has rapidly increased the income of ordinary Turkish people. Goldman can't allow production anywhere, can't allow ordinary people to earn income from
and especially can't allow an Islamic-flavored economic system to succeed. So it's imperative to bring down Erdogan before the Production contagion spreads.
= = = = =
Old Steinbeck, though he had strong socialist tendencies, wasn't locked into Marxian ideology. He saw the early stages of our Gramscian cancer:

He could have worked in the canneries all the time had he wished, for in that industry, which complains bitterly when it does not make back its total investment every year in profits, the machinery is much less important than the fiscal statement. Indeed, if you could can sardines with ledgers, the owners would have been very happy.

Still marveling at the circus of multi-layer nonsense surrounding the "revelations" on spying.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has decried the revelation of the intelligence-gathering programs as reckless and said it has done “huge, grave damage.” In recent days, he took the rare step of declassifying some details about them to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government.

Why damage? Sane people have known about this for a long time.
Most importantly, our supposed "enemies" have known about it as well. Why the fuck do you suppose Sheikh Osama used all sorts of cutouts and personal messengers to insulate his communications from the Web? He understood the system.
If you focus on the phrase supposed "enemies", the answer becomes clear. Clapper obviously doesn't care that al-Qaeda already knows everything about his system. He DOES care that the American people are learning something about his system. This tells you who NSA's real enemies are. And that's no surprise either.

At NPR, Alan Greenblatt looks at the supposedly new "revelations" about NSA in light of dystopian authors. He gets Orwell's intentions right, which is unusual for modern reviewers. But he forgets the most appropriate dystopian....
"What would have surprised Orwell was not that governments are collecting huge amounts of data about individuals, but that private actors are as well."
True. But CS Lewis wouldn't be surprised. His NICE is exactly Google.

Roses are hitting their prime this week. Instead of showing them in CG form as I've done several times, figured I should give them proper photographic credit for their work!
They seem to be favoring a double-headed approach this year, with two or three flowers tightly clustered on one branch.

Sort of continuing the theme of information / not information....
When the power structure conspires to commit a crime, normally truth-tellers are suppressed. They may be Fort Marcy'ed; or they may have a "sailing accident on the Potomac"; or they may be honeytrapped into silence. Most commonly they're forced into situations where they do something that looks crazy, so they can be dismissed as crazy.
The normal pattern doesn't apply with the Wall Street Mafia. On this subject we have at least a dozen smart and knowledgeable people who constantly tell the truth in wonderfully straight language. At the top of the stack we have Elizabeth Warren, Sheila Bair, William Black, and Eliot Spitzer. Of those four, only Spitzer has been honeytrapped, but he decided not to shut up, and nothing bad has happened to him since then.
Of course the power structure is completely ignoring these truth-tellers, proceeding as usual to steal from the poor and give to the rich. That's standard.
But why is the rest of the standard procedure missing? Why do the truth-tellers continue to speak publicly without being suicided or crazified? I'm completely puzzled. No hypothesis.

A U.S. intelligence agency requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak of highly classified information about secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency... Clapper blasted what he called "reckless disclosures" of a highly classified spy agency project code-named PRISM.

First, there is no INFORMATION. In both scientific and common usage, INFORMATION means something you didn't know before. Pretty much the same definition as NEWs. NEWs means a set of facts that are NEW to you.
The fact that NSA listens to everything and everyone all the time has been known for 40 years. It is not INFORMATION.
= = = = =
Ssshhh! Don't tell anyone! The sun is hot!!!! Sssshh!! Keep it secret! I'll put you in jail if you tell anyone!
Whoops. I was trying for a silly analogy, but it's unfortunately too perfect. The fact that the sun warms the earth is ALSO classified "information". You probably won't end up in jail for saying it, but you can lose your job and credibility for saying it.
In both cases the official "fact" is bizarrely false. Officially, NSA only listens when it gets a search warrant. Officially, only Evillllll KKKarbonnnnn warms the earth.
Backing away from this convoluted roiling maze of gibbering nonsense, let's ask what a spy agency should be doing. It should be trying to learn what our country's enemies are doing, so that our country's government can counteract the enemies. Focused action toward a focused purpose.
This is manifestly not what NSA, CIA, and all the other nameless agencies and pieces of agencies are doing. They are trying to learn what ordinary Americans are doing, so that they can keep ordinary Americans from knowing what ordinary Americans are doing. Action without purpose. Or rather, action with the sole purpose of expanding each agency's power and budget.

NPR interviews some ex-ambassador type, now with some think tank. He says "The root cause of the humanitarian crisis in Syria is the persistence of the Assad regime."
Incorrect. There wasn't a humanitarian crisis before the revolution started. In terms of per-capita income, Syria was poor but nowhere near desperate. Assad did not start the revolution. Thus the root cause is the rebellion.
In any warlike situation you have to ask "Who started this fight?" Sometimes the answer is chicken-and-egg-ish, as with the Zionists vs the Palestinians or Serbs vs Croats. In Syria there's no doubt. The rebels started the fight. After that, there was no exit.

Everyone is getting weeweed up about "revelations" that NSA spies on everything.
(1) Not news. NSA has been listening** to everything since it was founded. No legal limits, no moral limits. The only limit is technical, and the Web expanded the technical potential almost to infinity. NSA was one of the charter nodes of the Internet, and remains at the center, listening to everything as always. If you haven't picked up this basic fact in the last 40 years, you shouldn't be discussing the subject. You are irredeemably unsalvageably stone cold vacuum-brained motherfucking ignorant.
(2) Most of the discussants are making the bizarre fantastic assumption that NSA (or GCHQ, FBI, MI5, etc) has a "mission to defend the country". I have no fucking idea where this fantasy comes from, and frankly I have no fucking idea what "defend the country" means. Our government stopped "defending the country" after the end of WW2. The concept no longer exists.
(3) NSA and the others are BUREAUCRACIES. This means they have EXACTLY ONE MISSION: to defend their own turf and budget. Nothing else. Nothing else. Expand my range of action, expand my budget. Nothing else. Nothing else. At a lower level, each agency has a sort of special sexual desire. NSA's sexual desire is to know everything and say nothing. FBI's sexual desire is to torture and kill Christians. And so on. These fetishes are secondary to the basic bureaucratic need, and can be softened when they interfere with the basic need of infinite expansion.
(4) Read Parkinson, dammit. He explains all of this.
= = = = =
**Footnote: The oft-repeated platitude that NSA is "only doing traffic analysis" doesn't wash. They've been working hot and heavy on speech recognition software, at least since 1980. You don't need speech recognition software if you're "only doing traffic analysis." You need it to listen to thousands of conversations at once.

Spokane’s Empire Health Foundation landed an $858,000 federal grant to help Eastern Washington residents enroll in health insurance plans under [Romneycare]. The organizations will focus on people who aren’t likely to use a website or a call center to get information on health plans and subsidies, the release said.

Fine, but who might those people be?
Not homeless dudes. All of them have cell phones.
Not youngsters. All of them are cell phones.
Only old folks > 75 are unlikely to use websites or call centers. But old folks > 75 are already on Medicare, thus don't need info about the new plans.
So who does that leave? Damned if I know.

I've insulted KREM, the local Belo outlet, several times. Need to give them credit when they commit a small but useful piece of actual journalism!
The Monroe St bridge is closed this month for construction of new sewer lines. KREM decided to run a time test on the alternate routes. Turns out that Maple, the widest and most "interstate-like" of the alternate bridges, is the slowest.
Surprising in theory but predictable from the real rules of traffic. Surface streets with stoplights are almost always faster than "wide-open" limited-access freeways. (Obviously you can find a super-slow way to wander through surface streets, but a relatively straight surface arterial is usually optimal.)

Obama has appointed Susan Rice, whoever she is, to some major position. Very smart move. Since the Repooflicans have a weird fetishistic hatred against Rice, this will keep them fully occupied every millisecond of every second of every hour of every day of every month of every year SLAMMING AND SMASHING the one word she mispronounced. Or whatever it is they HATE HATE HATE about Susan Rice, whoever she is. I've never managed to comprehend the whole mess.
Obama can now get something done without interference from the Repoofs. It's even conceivable that a mildly beneficial action might be among the things he gets done; but in any case this is good strategy.
= = = = =
The following is a strong and serious and heartfelt sentiment, emphatically not meant as irony or parody, though it might sound like parody. The best thing about Obama is what he doesn't get done. Unlike all Presidents in living memory, he's a reticent and cautious introvert. Unlike Bush, he allowed oil drilling to grow and flourish. Unlike Bush, he allowed new nuclear plants to be ACTUALLY BUILT. Unlike Bush, he doesn't invade every country that displeases Israel. Reticence has a bad side: Obama has also allowed the Jew Mafia to continue stealing trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions from the poor. But given a choice between a manic aggressive Goldman slave versus a depressive hesitant Goldman slave, I'd rather have the depressive hesitant Goldman slave. (Ideally I'd want to see an American leading the country, but that choice isn't in the cards.)

I keep hoping for a proper TV debate, WITH GRAPHS, on the 'global warming' crime. Roughly once a year a media outlet creates the opportunity, but the proper debate never happens. The mass-murder side puts up strong speakers and the truth side puts up weaklings.
Latest opportunity came, amazingly, on BBC radio 4. You can't use graphs on radio, but at least it was an opportunity. Mass-murdering psychopath Comrade Ed Davey was pitted against truth-teller Nigel Lawson. The genocidist gave Lawson an immediate opening for a sharp answer (consensus is not evidence) but instead Lawson sort of sort of ah ah ah stam stam stam stammered around and ah made some ah some ah some ah semi-relevant, that is, semi-relevant ah side ah side ah point in a weak uncon ah uncon ah unconvincing voice.
I stopped listening.
Lawson does a wonderful job of funding and organizing the truth side, but he's hopeless as a speaker. These opportunities are too rare and precious to waste, dammit.

The protesters in Turkey don't seem to be using the Occupy name, but they're just as incoherent as Occupy elsewhere. Some of them are unhappy with a new shopping center; some are unhappy with limits on alcohol; some are unhappy that their party lost the election. Trivial problems, as you'd expect from spoiled hippieshit brats.
They should be massively grateful to live in the MOST COMPETENT COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. Turkey has managed to grow its economy, grow average income, and shrink income inequality, without running any of the securitization or QE crimes that other rich countries are using. Finance is kept in its proper place and manufacturing dominates, which means that ordinary people benefit from growth.
Given the intense focus on these unfocused protests by outside media and outside governments, it's safe to assume that the protesters are driven by outside forces. And given the obvious connections between Occupy and the banksters elsewhere, I have to wonder if these demos are Goldman's attempt to bring down the only Euro government that refuses to serve Goldman.

Noticed something recently on morning walks. Anthills cluster in sidewalk expansion joints, and also along the edge of the cement. Sometimes there will be 6 holes in a three-foot joint. Neighboring areas of bare dirt, no matter how large, have exactly zero nests.
Why do they like the joints and edges? I can speculate: When your nest is mainly under a rock or under cement, you're cool and dry, and you're protected from birds and competing ants. You can relax your guard everywhere except the one hole. Close the hole and you're safe.
But those would be human reasons. Does the ant 'colony mind' think the same way?

I'd always heard stories about the strict requirements for radio announcers before the 1960's. Auditions included a long list of foreign words, and woe betide the candidate who missed one. (I encountered that list in 1965 when I tried to apply for an intern position at a local station; I handled the words easily, but my adolescent voice was too high.)
When did this practice start? Turns out it started at the EXACT start of professional radio, KDKA in 1920. This article from Radio World is worth reading:
Though commercial radio no longer has standards, NPR announcers still have to endure those "coals of fire" for pronunciation and grammar.

Listening to some feminist idiots on BBC spewing the old standard ratshit about "We need to get more wyyymmmyyyns into positions of power, because woemoans are the nurturers. Governance will change dramatically for the better if more weeeempersons gain power."
Okay, fine. Let's list some gentle nurturing wyoemyoins in positions of power over the last 2000 fucking years.
England: Boadicea, Elizabeth 1, Victoria, Maggie Thatcher.
Russia: Catherine the Great
Spain: Isabella
Argentina: Eva Peron, Cristina Kirchner
China: Madame Mao
India: Indira Gandhi
Israel: Golda Meir
Pakistan: Benazir Bhutto
Germany: Angela Merkel
Some are great empire-builders or atrocious tyrants; all are hard uncompromising rulers. None are soft or "nurturing".
Come on, comrades. We know you're incapable of understanding or observing facts, but you really need to step up the quality of your poison. See if you can find a toxic falsehood that can't be knocked down in one second. Produce some vicious murderous anti-civilization nonsense that requires at least 5 minutes of research to counteract. I fucking dare you.

Was thinking about idiot Repooflican opposition to the Online Sales Tax, when a bigger point struck me.
Our entire tax system is designed to discourage local production. Think about it: When you sell INSIDE A STATE, you pay MORE than when you sell OUTSIDE A STATE. When you bring something in from overseas, whether it's parts or labor or a worker, you pay no tax at all.
This is exactly backwards.
We should be tipping the gradient the other way, encouraging things to be produced (or services to be provided) closer to where they're sold.
Solution: Replace all income and sales taxes with a DAT. Distance Added Tax.
Each time an object or a worker or an hour of labor is transferred from seller to buyer, it should pay tax according to the distance it moves. If it stays within one metro area, or within a 100 mile radius, no tax at all. Tax increases for each added 100 miles between source and user. Ohm's Law.
This would automatically provide tariffs on incoming stuff, incoming labor, and incoming workers, without the need to negotiate new treaties; but it would not require a tariff for things made and sold within a cross-border metro area like Vancouver/Bellingham or Detroit/Windsor.

I watched KFOR's live coverage of the OKC superthunderstorm last night. Transfixed for 10 minutes or so... during those 10 minutes, lightning flashed constantly at a rate of about 3 per second. That's 1800 flashes in 10 minutes.
Compare that to Spokane. We get about 3 thunderstorms per year, and each storm has about 3 lightning strikes audible from my house.
At that rate, Spokane would need 200 years to beat those 10 minutes of one storm in OKC.
Admittedly this storm is considerably more flashy than the Okla norm, but not unprecedented. When I lived in OKC and Enid, at least one storm each year was up to this standard.
= = = = =
This piece of the Weather Bureau's record from Tinker tells the impressive story. Absolutely everything was happening. Every type of weather except sunny. Three inches of rain in one hour, followed by two more inches over the next few hours.

The Occupy movement is Wall Street's best friend. Our hippieshit and banker characters return today with slogans of the latest Blockupy protests in Germany. We'll call the characters RiotGrrl and GoldMaan for convenience.
= = = = =
RiotGrrl: No more fences! No more borders!
GoldMaan: We agree. In fact we've already eliminated borders in Europe, and we've softened them everywhere else. We love it when people and money and labor move freely around the world! It means we no longer have to waste money on wages! We can keep it all in circulation among ourselves, among the financial class.
= = = = =
RiotGrrl: There must be something better than the nation!
GoldMaan: Listen, babe, you're way behind the times. Haven't you noticed? Nations have already been replaced by something better. Something better is, of course, Goldman. All major governments are Goldman divisions, run by Goldman employees, serving Goldman's purposes. People used to joke about the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Now it's even simpler. The Goldman Rule: Goldman makes the rules.
= = = = =
RiotGrrl: Resist Austerity!
GoldMaan: We don't like austerity either, and unlike you, we've actually done something about it. Austerity means that people save for the future and live within their incomes, with very little borrowing. We hate that! Borrowing is how we make our profit. So we simply stopped paying interest for savings, to cut our costs and to force people into markets where we can make a profit.
RiotGrrl: But you imposed austerity on Italy and Greece!
GoldMaan: Yes, we had to do that so they wouldn't bring down the whole structure. Their bonds were pulling up the interest rate curve, which threatened to provide a non-stock investment choice. Can't have that.
= = = = =
RiotGrrl: Social change, not climate change!
GoldMaan: Agreed on both points.
First, we love it when social structures break down. Religious traditions encourage people to save for the future, to live cautiously, and to enjoy work, community and faith. Broken societies must desperately try to enjoy the present moment with commercially produced stuff and commercially produced entertainment. It never works, so a broken culture is hopelessly addicted to spending and borrowing! Beautiful!
Second, the 'climate change' bubble is one of our proudest creations. We funded fake research and forced governments to set up cap-and-trade arrangements, so we could profit from trading the Indulgences.
Look, babe, I shouldn't be saying this.... but if you really want to resist us, you need to take the opposite side of every sign you've put up. Work for stronger national governments, less free trade, less diversity, stronger religious traditions, more frugality, more nuclear power. Those are the things we hate.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.